Stop right now, thank very much! I need somebody with a human touch...

Many years go, the Spice Girls famously declared they needed "somebody with a human touch" and the same remains true today for customers dealing with service organisations, who often find themselves frustrated when dealing with poorly designed automated bots. Are we close to a world where the human touch will no longer be required?

When we work with customer facing businesses, one of the first exercises we carry out with them is populating the demand / resolution matrix. This helps us begin to understand the reasons why customers are making contact- split into value or failure demands - and how effective the organisation is at responding to those contacts. Some examples of these contacts and responses are below.

The next stage is to quantify the percentage of contacts that fall into each category. Below is a typical example.

In this (real life) example, 11% of contacts were from customers with a Value demand where the call was able to be resolved at 1st point of contact. Great opportunity for automation and self-service!

But over half of contacts were from customers for whom something had not gone right, and they then ended up dealing with someone who was unable to resolve the issue for them, with 1 call in 3 "passed on" to another team.

Whilst tools like Agent Assist / Co-Pilot could definitely play a role to support Agents dealing with the 89% of calls that weren't resolved at 1st point of contact, the priority should be identifying opportunities to reduce the high volume (73%) of Failure Demand calls, and improving the 1st contact resolution rate of 32%, rather than trying to automate these contacts

Why does this matter?

It's critical to get an understanding of the root causes of the failure demand, and also to understand how the way in which the service has been designed is hindering Agents from resolving customer issues.

High levels of failure demand can be caused when customers haven't received something they expected, haven't been kept informed of what's happening, or things are just taking too long.

Low levels of 1st contact resolution can be caused by Agents not having authority to make decisions, low visibility of what's happening in another department, or poorly designed processes.

Dealing with high volumes of these types of contact can be frustrating for Agents, as they have to use their skill and experience to navigate their way around the formal processes to find a solution for the customer, whilst displaying high levels of empathy, something AI isn't yet capable of doing.

If you'd like to learn more, or find out what the demand/resolution matrix might look like in your organisation, then please get in touch. It's quick and easy to get started and the results may just surprise you and kick-start a valuable conversation about priorities.